The Singularity Summit 2010 is almost here! The full schedule has been posted on the website. Here it is:

Day 1: The Future of Human Evolution

8:00 AM - 9:00 Registration starts. Breakfast served outside the hotel by Boudin
9:00 - 9:05 Sean McCabe: Introduction
9:05 - 9:40 Michael Vassar: The Darwinian Method
9:45 - 10:25 Gregory Stock: Evolution of Post-Human Intelligence
10:25 - 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 - 12:00 Ray Kurzweil: The Mind and How to Build One
12:05PM - 12:40 Ben Goertzel: AI Against Aging
12:40 - 2:10 Lunch: Served by Boudin Outside the Hotel
2:10 - 2:45 Steven Mann: Extending Ourselves with Technology
2:50 - 3:20 Mandayam Srinivasan: Replacing Our Bodies
3:25 - 4:10 Brian Litt: The Past, Present and Future of Brain Machine Interface
4:15 - 4:45 Demis Hassabis: Machine Learning is Rapidly Discovering How the Brain Works
4:50 - 5:15 Coffee Break
5:20 - 5:45 Terry Sejnowski: Reverse-Engineering Brains is Within Reach
5:50 - 6:15 Dennis Bray: What Cells Can Do That Robots Can’t
6:15 - 7:00 Sejnowski/Bray Debate: Will We Soon Realistically Emulate Biological Systems?
7:00 PM Closing

Day 2: Why and How We Should Solve the World’s Problems

9:00AM - 9:35 Eliezer Yudkowsky: Simplified Humanism and Positive Futurism
9:40 - 10:15 Ramez Naam: The Digital Biome
10:15 - 10:40 Coffee & Bagels served by Boudin (see directions and map)
10:40 - 11:10 Lance Becker: Modifying the Boundary Between Life and Death
11:15 - 11:45 Ellen Heber-Katz: The MRL Mouse - How It Regenerates and How We Might Do the Same
11:50 - 12:35 Anita Goel: Rapid Diagnostics and Sensing with Nanofluidics
12:35PM - 2:00 Lunch Served by Boudin outside the hotel (see the map)
2:00 - 2:35 Shane Legg: Universal Measures of Intelligence
2:40 - 3:15 John Tooby: General Intelligence and Narrowly Intelligent Modules
3:20 - 4:00 Tooby, Goertzel, Yudkowsky & Legg panel: “Narrow and General Intelligence”
4:00 - 4:25 Break
4:25 - 4:55 David Hanson: Emotionally Intelligent Machines
5:00 - 5:30 Joseph Tsien: Deciphering Memory Code in the Brain
5:35 - 6:10 Irene Pepperberg: Nonhuman Intelligence: Where We Are and Where We’re Headed
6:15 - 7:00PM James Randi: Is There Such Thing as Scientific Consensus?

Are you interested in reducing existential risk? Are you a student who wants to donate to existential risk reduction, but doesn’t have any money? Are you a past or present Visiting Fellow applicant? Do you want to apply to the Visiting Fellows program, but can’t take time off work or school? If the answer to any one of these questions is yes, you should join the Singularity Institute Volunteer Program. The Singularity Institute is looking for volunteers to do things like:

- Review and proofread SIAI publications.
- Promote SIAI sites like singinst.org and lesswrong.com.
- Contribute content to the SIAI Blog.
- Create online videos or other digital content.
- Volunteer for the 2010 Singularity Summit.
- Organize monthly dinner parties to cultivate new supporters.
- Translate SIAI webpages into other languages, e.g. French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, etc.
- Contribute to the collaborative rationality blog Less Wrong.
- Host a Less Wrong meetup, or remind organizers to host them.

Requirements for volunteers are fairly minimal, but you must be able to:

- Read and write English on a basic or higher level
- Complete tasks reliably with minimal supervision
- Stick to deadlines, and let us know if you can’t meet them

Additional skills, like programming, ability to write well, foreign languages, math talent, etc. are a definite plus. If you are interested, please shoot us an email with a brief summary of who you are, what your interests and skills are and how you’d like to help.

If you want to contribute, but don’t know how you can help, please email SIAI Volunteer Coordinator Louie Helm at louie.helm@singinst.org.

If you already have a project or projects that you think might be relevant to reducing existential risks, please email SIAI Visiting Fellow Thomas McCabe at tom.mccabe@singinst.org.

If you want to volunteer for the 2010 Singularity Summit, held in San Francisco on August 14th-15th, please email SIAI Summit Organizer Aruna Vassar at aruna.vassar@singinst.org, even if you can’t attend the Summit in person.

Apply today!

We’ve added John Tooby, the founder of evolutionary psychology, to our excellent roster for this upcoming August 14-15 conference at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, along with Ramez Naam, author of More Than Human.

For those interested in technology and science, this is a star-studded roster. I’ve listed them before on this blog, but let me mention a few of the highlight speakers yet again: Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, the “world’s first cyborg” Stephen Mann, animal intelligence pioneer Irene Pepperberg, leading bionanotechnologist Dr. Anita Goel, bioethicist Gregory Stock, computational neurobiologist Terry Sejnowski, creator of the world’s most realistic humanoid robots, David Hanson.

Register now, and save $200 on the at-the-door price.

https://www.singularitysummit.com/registration/

We also still have discounted hotel rooms available at the Hyatt.

See you in San Francisco! This will be one of the best science/technology conferences ever.

There only a week to register for our conference before the price goes up again — right now it is $485. Students get $100 off. For every non-student you refer who signs up, you get an additional $100 off, with no limit. How do referrals work? Get your friend to sign up, then email me, and I’ll send you a special discount code. There are also major discounts on hotel reservations, if you hurry — Hyatt rooms are available for the special rate of $139 — much less than the usual $199.

Why is the Singularity Summit important? I wrote up some longer thoughts on that at my personal blog, but the basic answer is that the Singularity Summit is truly a uniquely valuable conference — there isn’t anything else like it for science, technology, and futurism thinkers. Few conferences have top scientific experts from so many varying fields: Artificial Intelligence, robotics, computational neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces, nanobiotechnology, augmented reality, regenerative medicine, and a lot more. If you attend, you will find that this is the most intellectually stimulating conference you’ve attended all year, and with some of the best networking in one of the hottest innovation zones on the planet.

This year’s Singularity Summit will be held on August 14-15 at the San Francisco Hyatt Regency. Speakers include:

Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist, author of The Singularity is Near
James Randi, renowned skeptic and debunker, founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation
Dr. Anita Goel, a leader in the field of bionanotechnology, Founder & CEO, Nanobiosym, Inc.
Dr. Irene Pepperberg, leading investigator of animal intelligence, trainer of the African Grey Parrot “Alex”
Prof. Alan Snyder, Director, Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, researcher in brain-computer interfaces
Prof. Steven Mann, augmented reality pioneer, professor at University of Toronto, “world’s first cyborg”
Dr. Gregory Stock, bioethicist and biotech entrepreneur, author of Engineering Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future
Dr. Ellen Haber-Katz, a professor at the Wistar Institute who studies rapid-regenerating mice
Joe Z. Tsien, scholar at the Medical College of Georgia, who created a strain of “Doogie Mouse” with twice the memory of average mice
Eliezer Yudkowsky, research fellow with the Singularity Institute
Michael Vassar, president of the Singularity Institute
David Hanson, CEO of Hanson Robotics, creator of the world’s most realistic humanoid robots
Demis Hassabis, research fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at the University of London

…and many others. We hope to see you in San Francisco on August 14th!

The Singularity Summit 2010 features a variety of discounts for registration, including $100 off for students and $100 off for every non-student referral. However, the greatest discounts are for registering early — there is a $300 discount off the at-the-door cost of the conference if you register by midnight tonight, Monday the 7th. After that, there will only be a $200 discount until July 1st, and a $100 discount until August 1st. If you register now, you can get your ticket for $385, or $285 if you’re a student or make a referral. There is no limit on discounts for non-student referrals, so you can refer multiple people for an even greater discount. See you August 14-15 for this exciting conference at the San Francisco Hyatt!

It’s that time of the year again — the Singularity Summit 2010 is scheduled for August 14-15 at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. See you there! Here is our press release:

Singularity Summit 2010 returns to San Francisco, explores intelligence augmentation
Speakers include Futurist Ray Kurzweil, Magician-Skeptic James Randi

Will it be one day become possible to boost human intelligence using brain implants, or create an artificial intelligence smarter than Einstein? In a 1993 paper presented to NASA, science fiction author and mathematician Vernor Vinge called such a hypothetical event a “Singularity”, saying “From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye”. Vinge pointed out that intelligence enhancement could lead to “closing the loop” between intelligence and technology, creating a positive feedback effect.

This August 14-15, hundreds of AI researchers, robotics experts, philosophers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and interested laypeople will converge in San Francisco to address the Singularity and related issues at the only conference on the topic, the Singularity Summit. Experts in fields including animal intelligence, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfacing, tissue regeneration, medical ethics, computational neurobiology, augmented reality, and more will share their latest research and explore its implications for the future of humanity.

“This year, the conference shifts to a focus on neuroscience, bioscience, cognitive enhancement, and other explorations of what Vernor Vinge called ‘intelligence amplification’ — the other route to the Singularity,” said Michael Vassar, president of the Singularity Institute, which is hosting the event.

Irene Pepperberg, author of “Alex & Me,” who has pushed the frontier of animal intelligence with her research on African Gray Parrots, will explore the ethical and practical implications of non-human intelligence enhancement and of the creation of new intelligent life less powerful than ourselves. Futurist-inventor Ray Kurzweil will discuss reverse-engineering the brain and his forthcoming book, How the Mind Works and How to Build One. Allan Synder, Director, Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, will explore the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation for the enhancement of narrow cognitive abilities. Joe Tsien will talk about the smarter rats and mice that he created by tuning the molecular substrate of the brain’s learning mechanism. Steve Mann, “the world’s first cyborg,” will demonstrate his latest geek-chic inventions: wearable computers now used by almost 100,000 people.

Other speakers will include magician-skeptic and MacArthur Genius Award winner James Randi; Gregory Stock (Redesigning Humans), former Director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at UCLA’s School of Public Health; Terry Sejnowski, Professor and Laboratory Head, Salk Institute Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, who believes we are just ten years away from being able to upload ourselves; Ellen Heber-Katz, Professor, Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program at The Wistar Institute, who is investigating the molecular basis of wound regeneration in mutant mice, which can regenerate limbs, hearts, and spinal cords; Anita Goel, MD, physicist, and CEO of nanotechnology company Nanobiosym; and David Hanson, Founder & CEO, Hanson Robotics, who is creating the world’s most realistic humanoid robots.

Interested readers can watch videos from past summits and register at www.singularitysummit.com.

I’ve created a group for the Singularity Institute on LinkedIn, to encourage professional networking among SIAI supporters and staff. Consider joining if you are an SIAI supporter and use LinkedIn.

The Singularity Institute is pleased to welcome Max Tegmark, professor at MIT and a cosmologist as the newest member of our greatly valued advisory board. Prof. Tegmark has done pioneering research in precision cosmology, “combining theoretical work with new measurements to place sharp constraints on cosmological models and their free parameters”. Prof. Tegmark will help the Singularity Institute by expanding our network at MIT and within academia in general. Thank you for joining us, Professor Tegmark!

Thanks to our donors, yesterday we met our fundraising goal of $100,000 for the 2010 Singularity Research Challenge. SIAI would like to thank the grant’s matching donors and everyone who contributed. Every donation, however small, funds research and advocacy targeted towards maximizing the probability of a positive Singularity.

If you have any questions or comments about SIAI’s activity or would like to discuss targeted donations for future projects, please feel free to contact us anytime at institute at singinst dot org. We also encourage you to subscribe to this blog, if you haven’t already, to stay up-to-date on SIAI’s activity.

Again, thank you, and here’s to a productive and successful 2010!

Thanks to generous contributions by our donors, we are only $11,840 away from fulfilling our $100,000 goal for the 2010 Singularity Research Challenge. For every dollar you contribute to SIAI, another dollar is contributed by our matching donors, who have pledged to match all contributions made before February 28th up to $100,000. That means that this Sunday is your final chance to donate for maximum impact.

Funds from the challenge campaign will be used to support all SIAI activities: our core staff, the Singularity Summit, the Visiting Fellows program, and more. Donors can earmark their funds for specific grant proposals, many of which are targeted towards academic paper-writing, or just contribute to our general fund. The grants system makes it easier to bring new researchers into the fold on a part-time basis, widening the pool of thinkers producing quality work on Artificial Intelligence risks and other topics relevant to SIAI’s interests. It also provides transparency so our donor community can directly evaluate the impact of their contributions.

Human-level and smarter Artificial Intelligence will likely have huge impacts on humanity, but only a tiny number of researchers are working to understand how to ensure those impacts are good ones. The role of the Singularity Institute is to fill that void, bringing scholarship and science to bear on challenging questions. Instead of just letting the chips fall where they may, help the Singularity Institute increase the probability of a positive Singularity by contributing financially to our research effort. We depend completely on donors like you for all funding.

2010 marks the 10th year since SIAI’s founding. With your help, SIAI will still exist in 2015, 2020, 2025… however long it takes to get to a positive Singularity. Thank you for your support!

The 2010 Singularity Research Challenge campaign has been going well, with $77,080 raised so far. Including matching funds, that comes to $154,160 raised for SIAI since we began the Challenge! Thanks to these contributions, SIAI’s continued operations and growth will be ensured for the immediate future. This money will support our staff, the Singularity Summit 2010, our highly successful Visiting Fellows program, all funded grant proposals, and other existential risk-reducing SIAI activity.

Even though we’ve raised a lot so far, we aren’t done yet! Please contribute to help us achieve our goal, and please feel free to get in contact with Anna Salamon at annasalamon at singinst dot org if you are making a large donation to fund a new project. Even if you wish to make a small donation, understand that small donations matter. We appreciate contributions of any size because they show us that you care about the Singularity.

Whether you donate or not, we recommend browsing SIAI’s grant proposals to get a better idea of some of the work we’re doing. You can also review our 2009 accomplishments to see our past record. Half of the funds from this challenge will go to grants, while the other half goes to our general fund, which supports our core staff, including Eliezer Yudkowsky and the organizers of the Singularity Summit 2010. All donations are securely processed through Paypal. You can pay through Paypal using your credit card even if you don’t have a Paypal account. You can also send checks to our P.O. Box, listed here. You can also read an endorsement of SIAI by a prominent utilitarian, or read quotes by our donors in the quotes section.

Donate now, and help bring mankind closer to a positive Singularity.

New staff bios have been added to SIAI’s team page: short bios for Research Fellows Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk, Media Director Michael Anissimov, and Chief Compliance Officer Amy Willey. Check them out, and feel free to ask if you’re interested in knowing more about what each staff member does.

The Foresight Institute, an organization close to the Singularity Institute, is holding their 2010 conference at the Sheraton Palo Alto Hotel this January 16-17. Here is the blurb from the website of the conference:

Join us in for an exciting conference focused on the Synergy of Molecular Manufacturing and general Artificial Intelligence and celebrate the 20th anniversary of the founding of Foresight. Register online here. The two day conference rate is $175 with discounts for early registration!

Several rapidly-developing technologies have the potential to undergo an exponential takeoff in the next few decades, causing as much of an impact on economy and society as the computer and networking did in the past few. Chief among these are molecular manufacturing and artificial general intelligence (AGI). Key in the takeoff phenomenon will be the establishment of strong positive feedback loops within and between the technologies. Positive feedback loops leading to exponential growth are nothing new to economic systems. At issue is the value of the exponent: since the Industrial Revolution, economies have expanded at rates of up to 7% per year; however, computing capability has been expanding at rates up to 70% per year, in accordance with Moore’s Law. If manufacturing and intellectual work shifted into this mode, the impact on the economy and society would be profound. The purpose of this symposium is to examine the mechanisms by which this might happen, and its likely effects.

I will be giving a talk there on Friendly AI and anthropomorphism. See you in Palo Alto!

The following message is cross-posted from Less Wrong on behalf of SIAI Research Fellow Anna Salamon:

Last summer, 15 Less Wrongers, under the auspices of SIAI, gathered in a big house in Santa Clara (in the SF bay area), with whiteboards, existential risk-reducing projects, and the ambition to learn and do.

Now, the new and better version has arrived.  We’re taking folks on a rolling basis to come join in our projects, learn and strategize with us, and consider long term life paths.  Working with this crowd transformed my world; it felt like I was learning to think.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it can transform yours.

A representative sample of current projects:

• Research and writing on decision theory, anthropic inference, and other non-dangerous aspects of the foundations of AI;
• The Peter Platzer Popular Book Planning Project;
• Editing and publicizing theuncertainfuture.com;
• Improving the LW wiki, and/or writing good LW posts;
• Getting good popular writing and videos on the web, of sorts that improve AI risks understanding for key groups;
• Writing academic conference/journal papers to seed academic literatures on questions around AI risks (e.g., takeoff speed, economics of AI software engineering, genie problems, what kinds of goal systems can easily arise and what portion of such goal systems would be foreign to human values; theoretical compsci knowledge would be helpful for many of these questions).

Interested, but not sure whether to apply?

Past experience indicates that more than one brilliant, capable person refrained from contacting SIAI, because they weren’t sure they were “good enough”.  That kind of timidity destroys the world, by failing to save it.  So if that’s your situation, send us an email.  Let us be the one to say “no”.  Glancing at an extra application is cheap, and losing out on a capable applicant is expensive.

And if you’re seriously interested in risk reduction but at a later time, or in another capacity — send us an email anyway.  Coordinated groups accomplish more than uncoordinated groups; and if you care about risk reduction, we want to know.

What we’re looking for

At bottom, we’re looking for anyone who:

• Is capable (strong ability to get things done);
• Seriously aspires to rationality; and
• Is passionate about reducing existential risk.

Bonus points for any (you don’t need them all) of the following traits:

• Experience with management, for example in a position of responsibility in a large organization;
• Good interpersonal and social skills;
• Extraversion, or interest in other people, and in forming strong communities;
• Dazzling brilliance at math or philosophy;
• A history of successful academic paper-writing; strategic understanding of journal submission processes, grant application processes, etc.
• Strong general knowledge of science or social science, and the ability to read rapidly and/or to quickly pick up new fields;
• Great writing skills and/or marketing skills;
• Organization, strong ability to keep projects going without much supervision, and the ability to get mundane stuff done in a reliable manner;
• Skill at implementing (non-AI) software projects, such as web apps for interactive technological forecasting, rapidly and reliably;
• Web programming skill, or website design skill;
• Legal background;
• A history of successfully pulling off large projects or events;
• Unusual competence of some other sort, in some domain we need, but haven’t realized we need.
• Cognitive diversity: any respect in which you’re different from the typical LW-er, and in which you’re more likely than average to notice something we’re missing.

If you think this might be you, send a quick email to anna@singinst.org.  Include:

1. Why you’re interested;
2. What particular skills you would bring, and what evidence makes you think you have those skills (you might include a standard resume or c.v.);
3. Optionally, any ideas you have for what sorts of projects you might like to be involved in, or how your skillset could help us improve humanity’s long-term odds.

Our application process is fairly informal, so send us a quick email as initial inquiry and we can decide whether or not to follow up with more application components.

As to logistics: we cover room, board, and, if you need it, airfare, but no other stipend.

Looking forward to hearing from you,
Anna

The videos for Singularity Summit 2009 are now available at Vimeo. The few that are missing are either still awaiting confirmation of permission or the speaker asked for video not to be posted of their talk.

The Singularity Institute is seeking volunteers in the NYC metro area to help with promotion of the Singularity Summit, and tasks such as working out discount deals for Summit attendees in restaurants in the vicinity of the Summit and asking NYC community organizations for sponsorships. Interested parties can contact Aruna Vassar.

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is co-sponsoring a program on ending aging with gerontology researcher Aubrey de Grey and the New York Academy of Sciences, on the evening of Tuesday, September 22nd in New York City.

The End of Aging

An Evening with Aubrey de Grey

September 22, 2009 | 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

At the New York Academy of Sciences

Could it be possible for humans to live hundreds of years in the very near future? Is aging a curable disease? Iconoclast Aubrey de Grey predicts it’s only a matter of decades before regenerative medicine extends human life expectancy indefinitely. This event is one of five events in the 2009 Provocative Thinkers Series presented by Science & the City, a program of the New York Academy of Sciences. Cosponsored by the Singularity Institute.

We have extended the early bird registration deadline for the Summit from August 10th to August 20th. Register in the next two weeks for a ticket fee of $399 instead of $498. You can lower your registration costs further by mentioning the event in your blog or Twitter ($25 off), putting up a banner ad on your blog for the event ($50 off), or referring people (20% off per non-student referral). Students receive a 20% discount, and there is a forum for room and ride sharing available. (Though no one has posted in it yet due to insufficient promotion.)

The Summit will feature 27 excellent speakers, including Ray Kurzweil, David Chalmers, Peter Thiel, Aubrey de Grey, and AI specialists like Ben Goertzel, Marcus Hutter, and Juergen Schmidhuber. See you there!

In anticipation of our upcoming event in New York, the fourth annual Singularity Summit, the Singularity Institute is offering a set of discounts. The most important is early registration, 20% off until August 10th, making registration $399 instead of the usual $498. Other discounts include:

- $25 off for mentioning the event on your blog or Twitter.
- $50 off for posting a banner ad for the event on your blog.
- Students receive a 20% discount. Only 150 student seats available.
- Each non-student referral (up to 2) receives a 20% discount.

To receive any of these discounts, email us, except for the student registration, which only requires clicking a check box on the registration page and sending a copy of your photo ID. The registration page is here. A list of speakers is here. See you in New York!

I’ve just created a Facebook event for the Singularity Summit 2009. Feel free to join if you plan to attend.

For the last couple months, we’ve been working intensely on laying the groundwork for the Singularity Summit 2009, to be held in New York October 3-4. Now it is finally ready to be announced, on KurzweilAI.net as well as here.

This is the first Singularity Summit to be held on the East Coast. For that, and other reasons, it’s a huge deal. The lineup of speakers is fantastic, including David Chalmers, Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, and Peter Thiel, among many others. Like the epic Singularity Summit 2007 that landed on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, this Summit will be a two-day event.

The speaker lineup is very diverse, definitely the most diverse out of any Summit thus far. To quote Michael Vassar, President of SIAI, on KurzweilAI.net, “Moving to New York opens up the Singularity Summit to the East Coast and also to Europe. This Summit will extend the set of Singularity-related issues covered to include deeper philosophical issues of consciousness such as mind uploading, as well as life extension, quantum computing, cutting-edge human-enhancement science such as brain-machine interfaces, forecasting methodologies, and the future of the scientific method.”

You can register here. A page with banners for promotion is here.

Over the last year I have been updating this blog with news about the SIAI-related activities of the team. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to let current and potential supporters know what the organization is doing.

I’m pleased to be able to hand over to Michael Anissimov, who recently signed on as SIAI Media Director.

SIAI is seeking a logo to unify our brand. If you’re a graphic designer or have design talent, feel free to design a logo and show it to us. If we like it and want to use it, we’ll pay you a sum based on our mutual negotiation. Also appreciated would be any pointers to good logo designers you may have used in the past.

Send proposals to Michael Vassar and Michael Anissimov.

Michael Anissimov has joined SIAI as Media Director. A well-known science/technology writer and consultant, he blogs at Accelerating Future.

He will be responsible to communicating SIAI’s progress to the media and the public at large.

Anissimov has worked with SIAI over the years, and we are pleased to benefit from his writing skills and deep understanding of the challenges of AGI.

From SIAI Researcher Anna Salamon:

Want to increase the odds that humanity correctly navigates whatever risks and promises artificial intelligence may bring? Interested in spending this summer in the SF Bay Area, working on projects and picking up background with similar others, with some possibility of staying on thereafter? Want to work with, and learn with, some of the best thinkers you’ll ever meet? ? more specifically, some of the best at synthesizing evidence across a wide range of disciplines, and using it to make incremental progress on problems that are both damn slippery and damn important?

If so, drop us an email. Show us your skills; give us a chance to jointly brainstorm what you might be able to do.

We are particularly interested in people who have any of the following traits:

• Dazzling brilliance at math or philosophy;
• A history of successful academic paper-writing; strategic understanding of journal submission processes, grant application processes, etc.
• Strong general knowledge of science or social science, and the ability to read rapidly and/or to quickly pick up new fields;
• Good interpersonal skills, writing skills, and/or marketing skills;
• Organization, strong ability to keep projects going without much supervision, and the ability to get mundane stuff done in a reliable manner;
• Skill at implementing (non-AI) software projects, such as web apps for interactive technological forecasting, rapidly and reliably;
• A history of successfully pulling off large projects or events;
• Unusual competence of some other sort, in some domain we need, but haven?t realized we need.

The only musts are that you be capable, rational, and interested in helping reduce existential risk.

If you?re interested, send an email to annasalamon at gmail dot com, who will be doing the first-pass screening. Include:

1. Why you?re interested;
2. What particular skills you would bring, and what evidence makes you think you have those skills (you might include a standard resume);
3. Optionally, any ideas you have for what sorts of projects you might like to be involved in, or how your skillset could help us improve humanity?s long-term odds.

Our application process is fairly informal, so send us a quick email as initial inquiry and after some correspondence we can decide whether or not to follow up with more application components.

(Background on where we’re coming from: SIAI may or may not be taking summer interns, but we’re seeing who’s out there and brainstorming possibilities. If you’re part of who’s out there, do let us know. Plausible projects include:

• Improving technological forecasting around AI (with wide probability intervals, attention to the heuristics and biases literature, etc.);
• Writing academic conference/journal papers to seed academic literatures on questions around AI risks (e.g., takeoff speed, economics of AI software engineering, genie problems, what kinds of goal systems can easily arise and what portion of such goal systems would be foreign to human values; theoretical compsci knowledge would be helpful for many of these questions);
• Helping construct and/or test useful rationality curricula;
• Other activities that further our or relevant other actors’ understanding of what humanity is up against or how to address it — either directly, by research and writing on the topics themselves, or indirectly, by improvements in our individual or collective rationality.)

From Dr. Joel Pitt, who is working on the OpenCog project with the sponsorship of the SIAI:

The decision process for the 2009 Google Summer of Code projects has been completed.

The accepted projects are:

• Joel Lehman - Extending MOSES to evolve Recurrent Neural Networks
• David Kilgore - Python Interfaces For OpenCog Framework API
• Ruiting Lian - Natural Language Generation using RelEx and the Link Parser
• Rui Liu - Application of Pleasure Algorithm Project
• samir souza - Integration of Language Comprehension with Virtual Agent Control in OpenCog
• siva reddy - Statistical Learning and Refinement of RelEx Graph Transformation Rules
• Jeremy Schlatter - Distributed and Persistent AtomSpace
• Kemal Eren - Neurobiological data analysis in OpenBioMind
• Xiaohui Liu - Improved hBOA by integrating the BBHC and implement the simulated annealing algorithm

More detail is available for each on the Google Summer of Code OpenCog home page.

The OpenCog team will be offering a series of “hands on” OpenCog tutorials in April and May, aimed at teaching folks how to run and make changes to various AI code that’s been written for OpenCog.

Among those giving the tutorials are Drs Joel Pitt, who is working on OpenCog with SIAI sponsorship, Nil Geisweiller, and Linas Vepstas.
Link

Michael Vassar and perhaps others will be visiting the Bay Area on a regular basis on SIAI business.  If you have a car that you’d like to donate for SIAI official use, you should be able to deduct the Kelly Blue Book private party sale value of that car as a tax deduction, since we’ll actually be using the car rather than reselling it at auction.  (Most car donations will only get you the much lower auction value of that car, not its private-party sale value.)  Conversely we can only accept a safe car in good operating condition, not a junker.

Posting this now because the end of 2008 is fast approaching.   (As soon as you tell us that you want to donate the car, then, after we accept, the time you first committed to donating if we accepted, should count as the time of the gift for tax purposes.)